Central Saint Martins graduate Ece Tan has used her design skills for an unusual purpose - creating sex toys for cows. Her Happy Cow creations may be speculative designs rather than a product ready for market, but are meant to get people talking about whether we can give the animals “the dignity of pleasure”. By creating the sex toys she hopes to reimagine unavoidable parts of farming, such as insemination or milking, as more pleasurable experiences for the cows. There are three speculative sex toys in the final collection. An artificial inseminator dildo, a milking teat cup massager and a ribbed and dotted examination glove. The artificial insemination dildo is made of rubber, and is placed over an inseminator, allowing it to function, while providing a more pleasurable experience for the cow. Similarly, the teat cup massager alters the existing cup for milking machines to reduce discomfort in udders during milking. Meanwhile, the Happy Cow latex examination glove is re-designed to operate like a textured condom to heighten the sensation experienced during veterinary checks or insemination. Although not practically applicable now, Ece’s designs do draw on real research into how mammals experience pleasure and pain. Over the past 20 years various research papers have revealed that many other animals experience pleasure during sex - with creatures as diverse as bears, fruit bats, and rats being found to have sexual encounters for reasons other than fertility. Even if sexual behaviour is not romantic in the human sense. Ece hopes her sex toys make the experiences cows go through during insemination, milking, and check-ups more “tangible” to humans help us emotionally connect with their experiences and demand more humane farming practices. However, she does believe that if similar devices could be shown to improve the experiences of cows in dairy farms - then it might not be such a bad thing if the Happy Cow sex toy line became a reality!